Give Us This Day Our Daily Bread - Gail Onion

[Lawrence Robinson]

Give Us This Day Our Daily Bread 

Forests, oceans, meadows, their habitats
made uninhabitable, snatched
life from life.

 At the border,
children, mothers, fathers, where food is snatched from their mouths 
and in the cities, the tender and passionate freedom cries torn
from mouths of protest as
what we value, our health, our votes, our homes,
work and art are recklessly extinguished for a greed
that knows no limitations. 

Look, oh look, into the eyes of the starving creatures
we have condemned, taken their lives with out warning
from their marsh or desert or river.

The endangered are now ourselves.
Plans for better ripped away. 
The future crushed.

A world with its head on the guillotine,
the chopping block where
no good news is coming.
We drown daily in the gagged silence,
In daily massacres, truth deserts.

Our voices snatched by fear
and grief too weighty for words to lift,
to hold in syllables,
that few have the courage to say.

We hide in spurious bubbles of hope
and we are suffocating. 
And a madman brandishes a salacious  pin
to prick illusory bubbles,
to explode already crumbling hearts.
How easily killers win with their
pathetic triumphs.l

Our faces are raised from the earth?s death row.
We plead for mercy for emaciated children who 
look up from their skeletal cages for the torched land who lifts
its charred and mutilated body, 
for thousands of  helpless gunned down, 
for lives of the poor who look up at all that has failed them,
for the horrors of their suffering already being covered up.
.
We look to our beloved dead,
our heroes and wise ancestors,
our defenders of truth and love and justice, 
but their voices too are snatched away,
as we grasp desperately 
for something to save us.

And deliver us from evil. 
Amen.

	- Gail Onion
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